Thursday, April 23, 2015

Cheesy Tortellini Bake

Cheesy Tortellini Bake - made April 18, 2015

Once a month, we have a potluck at our church after our
Sunday service. It’s a chance for members to get together informally and chat
for longer than the few minutes after the service when everyone heads out. I
always take advantage of such gatherings to try out a new dessert recipe as
there’s usually more than a dozen people, sometimes up to 2 dozen, and it’s an
extra opportunity to bake beyond my Monday morning dessert offering at work
each week.

Lately though, I’ve been noticing that other people were
also bringing desserts and the amount of “real food” was dwindling, something
that afflicts almost every potluck I’ve ever been to. Dessert is just easier
and when church service is an hour beforehand, it’s hard to keep dishes warm if
they need to be served warm. We do have a couple of members who can be counted
on to bring savory dishes but there was a growing number of desserts also
coming in.

This time around, I decided I’d better play it safe and
bring a savory dish, just in case. And with my cooking skills, playing it safe
also involves mostly putting ingredients together rather than actually
“cooking”. So this easy tortellini bake was perfect. I made it up after
searching pinterest for ideas and it turned out to be really easy to brown some
lean ground beef and sausage, throw in a ready-made jar of marinara sauce, a
can of diced tomatoes and chopped fresh basil. Add fresh tortellini and some
cheese, and simmer until tortellini is tender.

I went a further step of placing it in a bakeware dish,
sprinkling the top with cheese and baking it for half an hour right before I
left for church. Cover and wrap in a blanket, and, even after sitting in my car
during the church service, it was still somewhat warm by the time it got
served. You can skip that part if you want to make this in a crock pot and just
keep the crock pot on low until serving.

The only thing I got wrong was I overestimated on the
amount of pasta I needed and it ended up being a little dry because I had too
much pasta in there. So I revised the amount of tortellini down in the recipe
below. I could have probably rectified that by adding an extra can of diced
tomatoes but – let’s not kid ourselves. I cook so infrequently that I bought
only what I thought I needed and didn’t have an extra can of tomatoes on hand.
But still, I thought this turned out pretty well. And I’m glad I brought it
because, as I had suspected would happen, the desserts outnumbered the savory
dishes at the potluck.